A Proliferation of Perspectives

Readers who loved Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist open James Joyce's Ulysses and, in Philip Kitcher's phrase, crash. This is the episode before the first page, before Telemachus and the tower, and it asks why a writer who could be read in an afternoon chose to stop being readable. Kitcher has an answer, and it is not the one about professors kept busy for centuries. It runs through an abandoned manuscript, a letter to a brother, and a definition of the word perspective that most readers never think to ask for. He also makes a promise about Ulysses that a philosopher is not supposed to make.